Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Book review - "Errol Flynn: Satan's Angel" by David Bret

Errol Flynn's life has inspired a number of particularly lazy cut and paste bios (Michael Freedland's leaps to mind). This one at least has the benefit of a particular angle - namely, to list all the people Bret reckons Flynn had sex with. Brett doesn't seem to have done manyinterviews or researched primary sources, but he read up on Flynn - particularly gossipy tomes like The Sewing Circle and Sex Lives of Hollywood Stars (oh, he got his info from Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead - let's face it, can you get more authoritative?) So pretty much everything needs to be taken with not just a grain of salt, but a mine of the stuff.

The book should be subtitled "Everyone's Gay" - not only was Flynn bisexual, his conquests included Tyrone Power, Bruce Cabot, Edmund Goulding and David Niven (David Niven????), and he had a crack at Patric Knowles, Helmut Dantine and Robert Taylor. Many Flynn fans get hot and bothered over allegations of their hero sleeping with men - as far as I'm concerned it's never been clearly proved one way or the other; Flynn had so much sex he may have liked to vary his targets a little, if only for something different... but I'm sorry, David Niven. Calm down, Bret.

Incidentally, for what it's worth, Brett doesn't buy into the Errol-was-a-Nazi claims of Charles Higham - though, as an aside, no one seems to have denied Erben/Koets was a Nazi, so Higham deserves some points on that score. The book is fairly crappy on the whole,sensationalistic and a bit tiresome in pages. Bret's "research" receives a fairly strong shell-acking here.

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